“Who are the Grateful Dead, and why do they keep following me?” -Long "New Yorker" article about the Grateful Dead

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Licorice

Good stuff here:

"The music, even in the standard verse-chorus stretches, often had a limber, wobbly feel to it that struck many listeners as slovenly but others as sinuous and alive, open to possibility and surprise. It came across as music being made, rather than executed. “These guys have evolved a thing where each guy is playing a running line all the time,” David Crosby once said.

“That’s electronic Dixieland.” The music critic Brent Wood has ascribed the sound of it to “the band’s emphasis on true polyphony, a texture heard only rarely in contemporary popular music.

Seldom do rhythm guitar, keyboard or drum parts vary at the same time as the bass and lead guitar. . . . Still more infrequently are all six parts being improvised.”

So you could attribute an aversion to the Dead to a failure of polyphonic appreciation. Or you could chalk it up to taste. “Our audience is like people who like licorice,” Jerry Garcia said. “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”